Achieving extreme laser intensities using magnetized plasma lens

The pursuit of achieving extreme laser intensity has directed interest in the plasma optics [1-4]. Plasma, having already been ionized can sustain much higher intensities (10¹⁷W/cm²) than solid-state media (10¹³W/cm²) without changing their inherent properties. We present a novel mechanism to compress and focus a negatively chirped right circularly polarized laser pulse using a shaped convex underdense plasma lens immersed in a strongly inhomogeneous external magnetic field to obtain a focused and compressed laser pulse. The 3D Particle-in-Cell simulations have been performed using OSIRIS 4.0 code with optimized lens and chirped laser parameters to achieve maximum intensity gain. We obtain compressed and focused laser pulses. The simulations show more than a 100-fold increase in the intensity of the incident laser pulse, and a very clean and smooth Gaussian pulse is obtained at the focus of the plasma lens. The simulation results can be tested in experiments with bigger focal spots, longer pulse widths, and high-energy laser pulses to reach exawatt-level power and very high intensities using magnetized plasma optics.